ROME, Ga. (ABP) — North Broad Baptist Church in Rome, Ga., has left the Floyd County Baptist Association after the group adopted a statement of faith that, among other things, bans female pastors.
Members of the church reportedly left the association's annual meeting the evening of Sept. 27, shortly after their fellow messengers voted to adopt the 2000 revision of the Baptist Faith and Message as the association's official doctrinal statement.
In November of 2003, the church called a husband-and-wife team to serve as its co-senior pastors. Shortly after Katrina and Tony Brooks began ministering at North Broad, the association's executive board recommended adoption of the faith statement, which says the office of senior pastor is for men only.
Messengers to the association voted 428-130 to adopt the statement. Earlier, messengers defeated by a similar margin an amendment that would have prevented any churches from being dismissed from the association in the future simply because they did not adhere to the statement.
In response, North Broad members presented a letter of resignation to the association, thus ending the church's 112-year-old affiliation with the body.
“I'm not sure how I feel right now,” Katrina Brooks said after the vote, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I don't understand how an individual church's decision on who its pastor will be could affect the ministry that the church belongs to. That's not a part of my framework.
“I'd like to hope they prayed about it and considered it, but they obviously felt North Broad's presence was tainting their association,” she continued.
But other messengers reportedly argued that the adoption of the statement was not aimed at excluding any particular church, but that the association had the right to set its doctrinal parameters.
“People are changing what they believe, and why would we expect any less from our integrity?” said David Harper, pastor of Rome's Hollywood Baptist Church, according to the Rome News-Tribune. “This could lead us down a slippery slope…. We could end up seeing the Nudist Baptist Church or the Homosexual Baptist Church.”
But North Broad member Carla Moldavan, a professor at nearby Berry College, said the church's decision to call the Brooks was God-led. “We didn't go out to stir up trouble. We made this decision with much prayer and thought,” she said, according to the News-Tribune. “There are wonderful, incredible people in Floyd County, and I thought there was a chance they would understand. I might have been too optimistic.”
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